


eyes like coin of gold; lips a reddest rose

by Bluecoeur (vietbluefic)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst and Fluff, Asexual Yussa, Blood and Violence, Castles, Coparenting, Dragons, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Friends Raising a Child Together, Friendship/Love, Gen, Gentle Ending, Gifts as a Love Language, Greyromantic Yussa, Kissing, Loneliness, Loosely Based on Beauty and the Beast, Magic, Magic as a Love Language, Marion Lavorre-centric, Mention of pregnancy, Mentioned sex work, Non-Linear Narrative, Non-Sexual Intimacy, One Shot, Pining, Princesses and Dragons, Rare Pairings, Somewhere Between Romantic and Platonic Relationship, Temporary Character Death, Yussa is a gold dragon, towers, unconventional romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29857554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vietbluefic/pseuds/Bluecoeur
Summary: “If you do not want to leave,” he says, “then I won’t force you. But I won’t have you live where a tyrant has spent his nights, either.”“No?” Her words are shaky. Relief makes her head swim, her breath gaspy. “Where— Where then will you put me?”“The tower by mine is empty, still. It will do until you decide otherwise.”He extends a hand. When she rises and goes to take it, the dragon’s palm is warm as a candleflame against her own.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre & Marion Lavorre | Ruby of the Sea, Jester Lavorre & Yussa Errenis, The Gentleman | Babenon Dosal/Marion Lavorre | Ruby of the Sea, Yussa Errenis/Marion Lavorre | Ruby of the Sea
Comments: 30
Kudos: 69





	eyes like coin of gold; lips a reddest rose

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to both those who've supported me and cheered me on from the Widojest Love and Essek Thelyss Fan Club Discord servers. I couldn't have done this without you!
> 
> I think they're just neat, and deserve nice things, and of course you who know me know that my personal love language is to write fairytales. So. Here is Marion and Yussa's. I started this all the way back in December, and now it is finished. As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved writing it. <3
> 
> (Also forgot to mention, but here’s [the fic’s playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JASfH3g6fppkafeY3WkT4?si=bf6ae551adf44729), as well as a spoilery [playlist writeup](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1boOS4bX8_7g-OAk0UJGi2mJtDgEy9qLWYu3u0OhB9iQ/edit?usp=sharing) for the song choices. Hope you like!)

Every night, Yussa comes to Marion’s room to share tea before the fire. And every night, before he goes, she touches his elbow and whispers, “Lie with me.”

And every night, without fail, he lays his fingers over hers, looks her in the eye, and says, “I will not.”

She smiles, sad and tender, but nods. Some nights, she is dressed in summer silks, sheer and light for the humidity. Other nights she is wrapped in furs, the castle floors freezing her feet. Once — the first time — when she’d felt the whole world squeezed around her so cold, and dark, and devastating — Marion claws out of her clothes and leaves them pooled by her bedside. Yussa enters to find her thus: naked before the fire, soaking up its heat. He only looks at her. She looks at him. The tea he brought cools, slowly.

“Lie with me,” she whispers.

His gaze flicks to her eyes. Flicks down again. Molten eyes press across her skin, palpable, soft as being licked. But he stands still, framed like a painting by her doorway. And there he says it. “I will not.”

He comes no closer. Red and gold they burn, together.

* * *

Marion had expected the dragon to be monstrous.

Instead, he appears in her doorway shaped into an elf. She is surprised, but also distinctly relieved. White hair, dark skin, and long elegant hands are far more welcome than fangs and fire. It is only because of his eyes that she recognizes him at all.

His irises gleam: vibrant gold. He pushes aside the beaded curtain and looks straight at her.

“Ah,” he says, and his voice is very low. Then: “I thought that I’d made it very clear everyone was to leave. This castle, after all, belongs to me now. That includes everything in it.”

“I know.”

She had heard him make the announcement — seen him surrounded by awed, terrified faces, court nobles and servants alike. But while everyone else packed, clamored and threw their most precious belongings over their shoulders, Marion hid. All castles have their secrets. Her favorite is this small alcove, tucked behind a door behind a tapestry beside the marble staircase. There, she’d huddled until all the voices had faded. Until nothing remained but dense, dust-stirred silence. Then she had emerged, and quietly made her way back to the harem, because where else did she have to go?

He scrutinizes her with those sun-bright eyes. Makes a contemplative noise. “You’re not afraid.”

“No,” Marion says. Then, because it _is_ a point of bitter, vicious pride, she adds, “I was his favorite. I’ve spent many nights bearing his cruelties, or comforting the others he’d torment. So, no. You don’t frighten me.”

“Well. Well.” The dragon cocks his head. “Be that as it may. You ought to have followed the other consorts when they left.”

Despite herself, Marion’s skin crawls at the notion. She thinks of the land beyond the castle walls — the long roads, the endless horizon, the vast consuming ocean — and her heart twists inside her chest, until suddenly it becomes very hard to breathe. Something inside her shivers, violently, and then won’t stop trembling at all.

“No,” she whispers. “I couldn’t have.”

“Is it money you lack?” he asks. He’s trying to be gentle, she thinks, but his tone remains too cool and thus he sounds so indifferent. “I can send you off with a small fund, simple enough. You’d have plenty of gold to find help in a city and get back on your feet. To go home, to your friends and family. Leave this place behind.”

Now she bristles. She has no jewelry to glisten from her horns; but she knows the impressive shadow they cast anyway when she holds her head high, holds his gaze strong and steely. Inside her, words boil.

 _No, no. I can never leave, never. I have suffered here, and wept, and sometimes even wished to die. But outside will be worse. In here, at least, I’m safe. I’m home, and you cannot make me go. You’d have to drag me, and I’ll scream, and I’ll tear up the floorboards and your eyes and you’ll lose your temper and eat me before you_ ever _make me go!_

She does not say any of this. Her lungs can’t draw enough air. But some of the words must show on her face, because the dragon narrows his eyes. The brightness of them blinds: a solar eclipse at its apex.

Then, he sighs.

“If you do not want to leave,” he says, “then I won’t force you. But I won’t have you live where a tyrant has spent his nights, either.”

“No?” Her words are shaky. Relief makes her head swim, her breath gaspy. “Where— Where then will you put me?”

“The tower by mine is empty, still. It will do until you decide otherwise.”

* * *

He extends a hand. When she rises and goes to take it, the dragon’s palm is warm as a candleflame against her own.

* * *

Marion’s new room is up a winding staircase, and the window at the peak has glass panels stained in green, yellow, and blue. The canopied bed is dusty but large. Comfortable with thick duvets and downy pillows. Best of all, the old king’s presence is not so strong here, and Marion finds herself releasing a breath when she steps inside for the first time.

“May I ask you something?” she says. The dragon has unlatched the window so that the room might air out. It swings open, and at once the space between them is filled with the sound of the sea. He hums.

“I don’t see why not. What do you wish to know?”

“I must confess…I don’t quite understand.” Marion winds her fingers together. “Am I your prisoner now? Your…guest?”

He regards her intently. Visibly deliberates what to say. Anxious but practiced in her patience, Marion maps the planes of his dark elf-face with her eyes, and waits. And soon he does answer, in a soft, solemn voice.

“I know who you are, Marion Lavorre. A rising courtesan, stolen from the Opal Archways at the height of her prime, by a king as wicked as he was promiscuous. They’ve written many ballads about it — call you the Ruby-Lost-to-Sea.”

That wrenches a laugh out of her, although she feels no humor whatsoever. “Do they? That’s a change, though not an inaccurate one.”

“Yes, well…”

He gazes at a point above her hands for a while. Then he says, “I have traveled all over the globe. Been across many planes of existence. And I have collected innumerable strange and wonderful treasures to add to my hoard.”

A beat.

“I have never found a living ruby before.”

“Ah.” She smiles, thin and damning. “So I am to be a prize.”

“No, madame. Not a prize. Nothing quite so base, I assure you.” He adjusts his long sleeves, then steps around her. “I’ll leave you now to settle in. Dinner is served at seven. My butler Wensforth will come fetch you when it is time.”

But then at the doorway, he pauses. He turns to her again. The dragon’s gold eyes are sharp but unreadable, irises edged in bronze. Marion stares into them, and a vague wonder flutters deep in her belly.

“Not a prize,” he murmurs at last. “Something worthy of safekeeping. These are not the same.”

* * *

Three times they kiss.

The first time, it’s just because.

It’s not Marion who initiates it, either. She and Yussa are on a walk along the castle parapets — the closest Marion can get to _outside_ without outright panic — when she turns to say something to him, perhaps a comment about the foamy waves below. But her eyes snag on his proximity. On the intense glow of his pupils, and the shape of his mouth beneath. And out of nowhere Marion is wondering how it’d feel to kiss him. How he’d taste; whether it’d be the way she imagines. _Fire and molten metals._ Peppery.

The thought floods her — drowns out the song of the ocean — until there is only her heartbeat, and Yussa. Her wizard, her tower-keeper. Her dragon. Her friend.

Maybe Yussa has been thinking the same. Maybe he only starts once he spies her looking.

Either way, his gold eyes slip from her face to her lips, and the question on his tongue ( _“Are you all right, Madame Lavorre?”_ ) dissolves to nothing. Then he stretches up, and his hand wraps around the back of her neck, and there is an instant of breath, of heat, of skin, before Yussa kisses her with both eyes open.

His mouth tastes like the edge of a coin — coppery but warm. Marion licks the seam of his lips, presses flush against him. Flutters her eyelashes closed, so that he can feel them tickle his cheekbones. Red fingers unloop the fastening at the throat of his robe, and Yussa makes a delicious noise that she swallows eagerly. Her teeth dig into him, and he _groans._ Several senseless seconds more, then Yussa breaks away. His breath rushes hot against her open mouth and she shivers in delight.

“Ah,” he whispers. Marion wants to hear him hoarse. “I should not have done that.”

“Don’t be stupid.” She tugs his hair. “Do it again.”

He grunts but doesn’t draw back. “Marion,” he mumbles, and how she aches to kiss her name off his tongue. “I am not a man. You cannot wed me and bed me as if I were one.”

“You feel like one.” She slides her fingers under his loose collar, presses into the soft spot where his pulse races. She draws closer and leans into him. She whispers, “I want to get to know you like one.”

“You can’t. Many have tried.” But the hand on her nape winds around her shoulders. The other settles on her waist. “It never changes the fact that I can only ever love as a dragon can. You must realize this.”

 _How does a dragon love, then, Yussa?_ Marion wants to ask. She doesn’t. They hold one another, standing miles above the sea, and Yussa is small and slim against her, the same way a giant serpent coiled into itself would be.

* * *

They share the dining hall. The first evening, Marion hangs silver chains from her horns, dons her loveliest gown, and swipes rouge onto her eyes and lips, until once more she becomes unattainable, untouchable, a living ruby. Wensforth turns out to be an older goblin, who knocks right on time and escorts her to the dining hall. Most of the new servants, as it turns out, are invisible. Those visible few pause as she passes. A minotaur squats a low bow. An elderly human woman curtsies. Golems part way for her. When she arrives, the dragon sits on one side of the long banquet table, sun-robed and incandescent.

 _Not at the head,_ she notices — and wonders about it.

“Ah. Marion,” he says. He stands to nod. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she returns with an easy smile. Wensforth pulls out her chair, and she takes her seat across from the dragon, who sits and motions a hand. Out float salads, soups, steaks in wine sauce, filleted fish over wild rice. Above hangs the thousand-faceted chandelier, and its crystal lights glimmer off Marion’s scarlet skin. She catches the dragon watching her over the rim of their teacups. She discovers then, too, that she finds him very beautiful.

“I’m afraid that I’ve been really very rude. I never even asked for your name.”

“Hm. A matter hardly worth your worry. Regardless, I am called Yussa Errenis.”

“Yussa,” Marion echoes. The sibilance of his name softens between her tongue and teeth. “You’ve been very kind to me, and I thank you for it.”

“Once you reach a certain age, madame, kindness becomes trivial for creatures like me.” A pause. “But, for what it’s worth, you are welcome.”

(Marion has nightmares that night, where she plummets out her open window into the salt-smell sea, drowning under a thousand tons of water. When she awakes, the window’s closed. A comb rests on her pillow. Lavish; encrusted with opal and onyx, speckled as dinner’s dark-and-pale rice. She uses it and the teeth slide _shhh, shhh_ through her hair, detangling knots with unnatural ease. The sensation evokes that of fingers, running gentle over her scalp.

Magic. She wraps the comb in silk and keeps it safe on her vanity.) 

They share the gardens. Marion can’t bring herself to move past the castle doors, not usually. But as the months pass, and the seasons change, she manages on very, very rare occasion to fight past that ten feet. She walks — out, _out_ — to the closest hedge of blooming roses. There, she brushes shaky hands over their petals and feels a little half-wild herself, bursting with equal parts pride and terror. Such moments never last long. But they are there.

The unseen servants must tell Yussa — or he notices himself. Whatever the case, sometime later Marion gets past the castle entrance a third time, and he is brightest gold among red and pink roses.

“Did you realize,” he pipes up once he spots her surprised face, “that there are breeds of flowers so rare and prized that humanoids have had each other assassinated for a single vine? Such a small, mundane thing to spill blood for. And yet.”

She beams. What an odd conversation starter!

“I _have_ read about that, yes. I think these are supposed to be enchanted as well. Something about these having a silkier feel… A stronger fragrance?” She reaches out to pick a flower. It is heavy, velvety between her fingers as she tucks it against her collar. Marion inhales, strokes it, and says, “If the old gardeners were to be believed, you could even gather the petals of these to weave fine dresses.”

“Ahh, yes. Magic-enhanced blooms. The most expensive cuts of which are claimed to be worth even a gray dragon’s hoard.”

Yussa squints at the blossoming hedge.

“Hmph. I can’t say I can imagine it. Now, if you could _consume_ these, it’d be a different tale altogether. But I’d already asked Wensforth and it’s unfortunate that these are in fact inedible… I’m certain, though, that with some amount of work, I could reverse-engineer the spell, perhaps add an equation that makes them more…”

Marion laughs aloud then, because Yussa has cupped a rose between his hands to scowl, as though at a particularly troublesome riddle. He pauses and glances sideways at her. Something in Marion quivers, and suddenly it’s as if she’s been doused in ice-cold water. The fresh air chokes her. The sky will consume her. The solid ground under her feet threatens to crumble to nothing. In an abrupt, frigid sweat, Marion excuses herself and rushes back inside. Yussa only watches her go.

(Marion bolts the window that night, and falls asleep with the rose crushed tight between her clammy hands. When she awakes, the wilted petals have been swept. A necklace threads atop her pillow. Lovely; garnets and silver filigree, shaped to resemble a vine of peonies. She puts it on, and fragrance rolls down her chest until she smells as if she’d just walked through a lush spring garden.

Magic. She places the necklace inside a velvet box, tucked onto a shelf on her wall.)

They share the library, too. The main space offers sofas and velvet couches before a magnificent hearth-fire. A piano sits to one side, where she’ll practice her arpeggios, scales, and sonatas. And the bookshelves! Endless — stretched from floor to balcony to domed-glass ceiling. This, more than any other room, becomes the apple-core of Tidepeak Castle. Although the old tyrant cared less for learning than for warm bodies, the library already housed an impressive stock: historical records, scholarly journals, romantic novels, even a few sex manuals. So, once Yussa adds his own collection and spends the better part of five years re-cataloguing everything, the result is that Marion has never laid eyes upon a grander library. Nor has she ever been more eager to spend whole days perusing its shelves.

Still: Marion suspects it is slightly more Yussa’s domain than hers. The dragon collects knowledge inasmuch as he does proper coin and gem. Whenever she sits there reading alone in the afternoons, Wensforth will rush in and out every other hour, piling books to bring his master. She catches glimpses of them. Thick scrolls. Encyclopaedic volumes. Tomes bound in leather so ancient, they’ve begun to crack. It becomes a game for Marion to imagine what the dragon needs to glean from such strange, archaic writings.

Twice or thrice, Marion even falls asleep mid-guess. She wakes to a pillow under her horns, a blanket over her chest. Her poetry or history book has been closed and bookmarked, set atop the low tea-table. Her face is warm; she’d dreamt of a dragon, breathing over her a tender rush of flame.

A silhouette stands before the hearth, where it stirs the logs with a poker. Gold robes glitter in the dim.

“Yussa…?” she murmurs, and moves to rise.

“Hush.” His voice rumbles the walls, an echo that trembles even her bones. “Go back to sleep, Marion. All is well.”

(She does so. When she awakes a second time, a ring has been slipped onto her right forefinger.

The gem is a star-sapphire. Very small, and very blue. She can’t tell if it’s magic.

Still, this one she wears — always.)

* * *

The ballrooms belong to Marion. So do the east-and-west wings, the throne room, the grandiose foyer and the almond-blooming courtyards. So do the keeps, the alcoves, the tapestried halls, the balconies with their alabaster pillars. A fair two-thirds of the old castle — all hers.

“Technically speaking…they _were_ yours before they were ever mine, O consort primary,” Yussa remarks. “At least they would’ve been, had your king been a just and fair one. Regardless. Better late than never, I suppose.”

He takes the treasuries, of course — as well as the towers. Emerald and andalusite; moonstone and amethyst. One in each corner of the castle, for each direction on a compass. The tower walls are inlaid with gemstones, which glisten and sparkle from Yussa’s presence. On sunlit days, the entire cliffside seems to glimmer like a million faceted stars.

Marion now resides in the one that glows as if a shard of the moon. During the daytime, she reads beside the window while sparrows chirp in her flower-boxes. Or she paints portraits, landscapes, fantasy skylines. Or she sits and watches the sea, crashing incessant far below.

Once, she peers down the cliffs, at the squiggle of shoreline there — only to see a yellow smudge upon the waves. She blinks. Squints harder. It does not float further out to sea, but there is movement. Something adrift?

Then the blob straightens up — _stands_ up — and Marion realizes: _oh!_ It is Yussa! Knee-deep in the foam; his long robes, swirling atop the gray-blue water. Sunlight breaks through the clouds and refracts off the embroidery, so that the figure of him scintillates. Now, Marion can just make out the snowy dot that is his hair.

Yussa’s sleeve flashes as he tosses something back into the foam. He bends and shrinks himself down again. Marion imagines his brown hands, up to their elbows in silt and saltwater. She smiles and wonders, _What are you looking for, my odd friend?_

Today, Marion does not watch the sea. She watches Yussa instead; an immovable speck on the endless churning ocean, tiny, and glinting.

* * *

Does he ever think of her?

When he takes noon tea up on the battlements — or goes down to the beach like that? When he is in his emerald tower late at night, working until the candles must drip to the floor? Does Yussa ever look to her moonstone window, dark to his ever-bright, and wonder if she’s still awake? Thinking of him?

* * *

(She does.)

She wonders.

* * *

Days become months become years.

Marion lives, content.

* * *

One day, she calls Wensforth over and asks if she can bring Yussa his books. The goblin is reluctant at first. But she presses him until he relents, and thus Marion carries four tomes up into the emerald tower.

She knocks on the door thrice, unsurprised when it opens by itself. Then Marion steps inside and gasps. The interior should not be this huge. The floor is half-darkwood panel, half-azure carpet. The walls are lined with diagrams, maps and charts like runic spiderwebs. Rotating contraptions hang from the ceiling, piled parchments glow star-pale. Arrayed across various desks are the books, jars, and bottled potions required of every wizard, each filled with contents more mysterious than the last. The whole place smells of char and earth.

And at the beating heart of it all stands: _Yussa_. He spreads the tables with wet-inked and dry-chalked notes, flips through grimoires for cross-reference, all while frowning over equations incomprehensible to her.

Without looking up, he remarks, “You’ve never come up to my workroom before. This is quite the first.”

“I just haven’t had the occasion to.” Marion turns in a slow circle, neck arched to peer at the geometric skylight-panes. “I didn’t think it would be so…so _bright_ in here.”

“No?” Now Yussa looks up, mouth quirked, grin wry. “Did you imagine I’d dally my days away in a dark, damp cave? Counting stalagmites along with my books?”

Marion bares her fangs at him, shiny-pearly and delighted. “Should I have thought otherwise? You _are_ a dragon, Master Yussa.”

He scoffs, but nonetheless sets about clearing books and chalk from an area of one desk. He says, “Sit, sit if you’d like. I’ll call Wensforth to bring up a pot of tea.”

“No need, Yussa, I’m fine.”

“If you insist, then.”

Silence falls. Marion’s humor fades, gives way to squirming nervousness. She sets down his tomes, picks up a crystal bauble, and sits to turn it, over and over, between her hands. Yussa’s quill _scritch-scritch_ es a quiet ambience. She peeks, and his gold eyes dart away.

But she knows him well by now. His brow knits and means that he is puzzled, perplexed, or concerned. Marion warms at the sight. His visible consternation grants her the courage to say what she needs, too, at last.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

The quill stops.

“It’s his.” Marion drops her gaze. Smooths her hands down her still-flat belly. “My thief with the long, dark hair… I’m sure of it.”

Yussa doesn’t say anything. He appears to be processing this. Marion waits, her long tail a-lashing, and studies his hands in the meantime. They flatten across his notes, slender but callused. Scribe’s bumps, poet’s fingers; the scorched-dark knuckles of a smith.

 _Mage’s-hands,_ Marion thinks with no little fondness. She rubs her arms and imagines kissing the sea-green veins in his wrists. Yussa blinks and looks up.

“Congratulations, Marion.”

She laughs wanly. Rocks a little.

“Thank you.”

More silence. Now it is growing unbearable. Marion buries her face in her hands, and whispers, “Yussa?”

“What is it?”

“Will you— Will you just hold me? Please. Yussa.”

There is only a moment of hesitation. Then Yussa crosses the room, and the desk creaks as he sits beside her. His arms are wiry but strong where he pulls her in.

She is rocking in earnest now. Yussa’s hands rest on her shoulders but don’t stop her. Just grounding; a ship in a storm, anchored. And if Marion sobs into the nape of his robes, however quietly, overwhelmed and terrified: then he is kind enough not to speak of it ever again, after.

* * *

Her love comes to her in the dead of night.

“Babenon,” he introduces himself, and sweeps a bow so elegant that she smiles despite herself. “Babenon Dosal.”

Her love is a merchant and a sailor, a thief and a scoundrel. He is also beautiful. A water genasi: damp-skinned, dark-haired, with subtle fins webbing the edges of his ears. He manages to sneak past the thorn maze, past the magical traps and ensnaring garden-vines. Past the silent servants, and guard-golems, and even Wensforth and Nadine and ever-wary Bluud. Right into Marion’s moonstone tower — where she nearly knocks him unconscious with an iron poker. It is a very eventful night.

Even so, he recognizes her. He calls the Ruby by name. And he is so openly awed — so genuinely charming — that Marion lets herself laugh unabashed, and drags him in by his lapels for a kiss, just because.

He leaves his jacket the first night. Comes back for it the following week. Again and again, Babenon returns to her each month, and departs the next morning with his item retrieved but another left in its place. His belt, his boots, his vest. His fine linen shirt. She wears his rings and dons his cape and tucks his handkerchief into her dress pocket. She sings and paints and watches the sea, soul light as a bubble inside of her.

Yussa, for the most part, tolerates this. The two men never meet, and on the nights her paramour comes her dragon will not appear, murmuring this is so they may have their privacy. Marion believes him. But she also suspects that he is somewhat miffed by Babenon’s presence — ever-mistrustful of strangers in their castle, and especially so of one who returns this often.

Still: “You seem happy,” Yussa comments. Marion giggles, holds his face, and nips playful at his cheeks until he flees, annoyed.

But she is. She is happy. She tells Babenon about life in the castle, about life with her dragon, and in turn he tells her about the coastal cities of his home and long journeys across the sea. They joke and banter and have unbelievable fun in bed. She splays herself across his chest while he sleeps, red tail coiled around his leg, and listens to his heartbeat thunder.

One morning, about a year into their arrangement, she stirs awake to Babenon kissing her eyelids. She smiles. Still half-dreaming, Marion murmurs, “I love you.”

He goes still. A moment passes before he replies, “I love you too.”

Her soul fills with music. She sighs and drifts back to sleep, lulled by the familiar cadence of his footsteps departing down the tower stairs.

* * *

Only later does Marion notice: he didn’t leave anything behind.

* * *

She waits.

* * *

She waits.

* * *

She waits.

* * *

Babenon doesn’t return.

* * *

“Will you help me look after them? My…my baby, I mean. Will you help me keep them safe…?”

“I am master of this castle, and guard of all in it.” Yussa’s gold-coin eyes are spark-bright, deadly serious. “Your child will always be safe with me, Marion Lavorre.”

* * *

(The next morning, there is a seashell on her bedside table.

Puzzled, Marion picks it up to find a note underneath. Unfolded, she recognizes Yussa’s script looping across the vellum. The message reads:

_This is an obsidian stone-shell, usually found along the shores of the Shattered Teeth. Supposedly, they make a powerful spell component when broken and ground. I’ve yet to confirm whether this is true. May you find it useful in some manner._

No more than that.

The shell is a conch, spiraled gray and black. Marion weighs it in her hand, and its surface grates rough and cold across her palm. Unable to resist, she lifts it to her ear.

A wave crashes and sprays her with foam.

She gasps and drops it. The stone-seashell plops harmlessly onto her pillow. She is dry. The window is closed. Marion hears nothing but the patter of rain, drummed over her tower roof.

Marion picks up the shell. Slowly, cautiously holds it to her ear, again.

The sounds and smells of the ocean wash over her. She hears gulls call. She hears the rumbling storm on the horizon. She feels the ocean spray, the salt-mist against her face. Yet she also still feels her bed beneath her. Blankets around her thighs, tail coiled ‘round a pillow. Marion sits in front of the crashing sea and also in her own home. Outside, but only sort of.

_Safe, still._

Magic. Grief melting away, Marion closes her eyes, and visits the beach for the first time in years.)

* * *

A week after Yussa takes the castle, adventurers come.

(They are the first; they won’t be the last. A tyrant’s-throne-turned-dragon’s-towers promises much for those on their ascent to heroism.)

Marion is the one to greet them. After all, she is now Lady of Tidepeak Castle — quest-giver, blessing-granter, fairytale objective and ally. And before even that, the finest hostess on the Menagerie Coast. It is only courtesy. So she pulls on satin gloves, adorns her horns and tail in jade, paints her eyelids violet —and when they arrive, it is the Ruby who awaits the adventurers at the top of her marble staircase.

“Welcome,” she says with an elegant sweep of her arms. “You’ve come a long way, I’m sure. Would you like some supper?”

They react with appropriate shock and awe. _The Ruby, the Ruby,_ she hears them whisper. Reassured, they set down their spells and weapons. Shuffle off their shoes. A motley crew of five, they are battle-worn and dusty from the road. Such a stark contrast they make with her so proud, bejeweled, wine-scarlet. A woman clad in chainmail stares, open-mouthed, and the Ruby can’t but smile back. At once the paladin clamps her lips shut, ducks her chin, emitting a tiny, bashful noise to have been noticed.

Marion guides them to the dining room, where the dragon of this fairytale awaits. Yussa greets them, perfunctory. On her horns and dress his eyes linger, lit lamplike from the inside-out. Everyone sits, eats, drinks, talks. The adventurers argue with Yussa, bargaining for his knowledge. The Ruby they approach with shyer questions. Why has she stayed here, how well did she know the old tyrant, how does she amuse herself in such a big castle. Though — when Yussa takes the party wizard and sorcerer to peruse his workrooms — it’s a young, half-drow rogue who asks after her proper.

“We heard about the old king,” he starts, halting and uncertain. “But are you, ah… Is the dragon, um…nice? Are you safe here, miss?”

A brighter smile finds Marion, touched by the concern. “I am. He does well by me,” she says and it’s not untrue. Every morning unveils a new treasure on her pillow. Even now, she wears an anklet that lets her dance without tiring, a waist-chain to summon harmless wisps that follow her everywhere, and diamond earrings that sing to her soft melodies, whenever nobody else is around.

By comparison, the rogue’s banded ring, and the paladin’s ceremonial dagger, are but plain, paltry things. Nonetheless, after Yussa excuses himself and the rest of their party heads off to sleep— They come to her. They talk to her in hushed tones. Present to her their gifts, along with what coin they possess. Peek at her, under cover of darkness. And their eyes, too, are but silver and bronze.

Precious still. The Ruby smiles. Thanks them, slides on the ring, kisses the dagger blade. Then she kisses the paladin. The rogue, next.

When she beds them, it is in a too-eager rush, a frantic sort of excitement. She spent years appeasing a cruel man’s hunger; now it is all enthusiastic, all wanted, all begged for. Marion pours honeyed jars down the drain of her loneliness, dives in and emerges the other side laughing herself winded.

Afterwards, she twines her fingers with leathery, callused hands, and falls asleep nestled between their bodies, warm down to her bones — as though she’d swallowed all the world’s fire, and all it’d tasted of was brandy and adoration.

Then not long past midnight, she jolts awake, because her companions are leaving.

“Ah. Forgive us, Lady.” The paladin takes Marion’s hand. Touches her forehead to red fingers. “Our cleric received an urgent Sending. We’ve been called to aid in Tal’Dorei.”

“Oh. Oh,” says Marion. Then, recovering fast, the Ruby smiles and remarks, “Then perhaps you should get dressed a bit quicker, my dear.”

The naked paladin flushes. Beside her, the half-drow laughs aloud, leather armor already on. He caresses Marion’s arm and brushes his lips to her hair.

“Be well, miss. Maybe someday, we’ll come back and see you again.”

(They never come back. Few ever do. On quiet days, Marion remembers, and mourns. Not all adventurers finish the journey, she soon learns.)

For now, though, Marion wraps herself in a robe, helps the paladin into her armor, and laces up the rogue’s gauntlets. Then she sends them off each with a final kiss. And that is it. They go.

She stands still. The sea crashes faintly through her window. They must leave via magic, because she does not see them on the cliffs.

She sits.

The fireplace went out hours ago. Nothing there but cold, gritty ashes.

Silence.

Darkness.

This huge bed: _empty._

Marion rips at herself and then lurches to her feet.

Restoked, the fireplace flares too high, too hot. Sparks whirl angry where she tosses logs through the grate. Marion cannot tear out of her robe fast enough. It is then that Yussa opens the door.

He looks at her. She looks at him.

At the slope of his nose. The arc of his hands. At white hair in a loose, sea-wave fall over his eyes. She is nude and the bed is unmade and the air still smells of sex. And they could. They could.

But.

_Lie with me. I will not. I will not. I will not._

“Why not?” she asks later — once she has a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a teacup warming her hands. It is a good brew Yussa’s brought: bittersweet but floral. Soothing. “You know, they paid me in things they held precious. At home on the coast, I’d be offered gems and gold for a much lesser performance. Yet here you are. Having heaped treasures on me. Having shared with me your new home — and your tea. Which I know you love.”

Marion raises her cup. Peeks at him, curious.

“Even so, it’s not what you want…?”

Yussa’s lovely mouth thins. His hands are dark, earthy around their cup from the firelight. Marion thumbs the glazed edge and thinks about the feel of his palm on hers. On her finger, the banded ring glints.

(He will not give her the sapphire for a while yet.)

“I want you,” he speaks at length, “to live your life free of fear. To walk wherever you might wish. To have reason to feel safe within these walls.”

“I do feel safe.”

“Good. That is all I wish from you, Marion Lavorre.”

Yussa drinks deep, then sets his cup down on the hearthstones. In the morning, there’ll be plush armchairs here before the fire, in which they’ll sit and have tea thereafter. This first time, though, there’s nothing. Thus, here they are, side-by-side on the floor.

“I’m…”

Yussa stops. His eyebrows knit, dig a deep groove between themselves. And _oh!_ Marion is hit with an epiphany. The dragon is fumbling. Her dragon: _uncertain._

“I am…a secluded creature. I’ve preferred to be one for a while. Therefore, despite my efforts…it can and does slip my mind what mortals may need for a comfortable existence.”

A pause.

“So, should there be anything that you require…”

Marion gazes at him. Then she puts aside her cup, rolls against him, and props her cheek onto his shoulder. The riot of her horns arches under his chin, caging him in. He holds very, very still. Oh, how she aches to drink him down too: a scalding sip of scale and steel and flame.

She whispers, “Come back tomorrow night. And the night after that, and the night after that… Come and have tea with me again.”

His sigh ruffles her hair. “A request you’ll regret,” murmurs Yussa. “I’m not particularly social at the best of times, madame. There will be nights I make an awful conversationalist.”

“We don’t have to talk. I just want to see you.”

The words leave easily — because they’re the truth. Yussa must hear that, because he turns his beautiful elf-face away, a new uneasy set to his jaw. Seeing that, she grasps again for levity and hums into his neck.

“Besides! I know Wensforth will thank me for getting you out of your tower more often.”

“ _Hmph._ That old goblin really _has_ been quite insistent…”

After several more moments, he turns. She shuts her eyes as his breath tickles the crown of her head. This close, his volcanic presence heats her skin, warms her to her core, and Marion’s mouth burns at the proximity of bare brown skin. Yussa smells like spice and molten metals.

I have never found a living ruby, he’d said.

_And I have never kissed a dragon._

“We’re in trouble,” she informs him. Then she laughs. A soft, sly sound. “We might get too comfortable, living together this way. You might even fall in love with me, Master Yussa.”

Gold eyes slide to her. They smolder from within: embers in the dark.

“Ah,” he murmurs. “That would be bad, indeed.”

* * *

He returns the following night, anyways.

And the night after that.

And the night after that.

* * *

Within the moonstone tower, the room is cool and quiet. The window is cracked open for light and air. Sunbeams splash color onto the blankets from the stained-glass panes. Far below, the ocean ebbs, sighing, crashing.

Her daughter arrives on a cloudless summer day.

A knock raps against the door. “Come in,” Marion calls, voice ragged. The door opens, and Wensforth’s bespectacled face appears.

“Miss Lavorre,” greets the goblin, hoarse, ever-polite. “The master is requesting entry, if you feel well enough?”

“Oh, yes. Let him in, Wensforth, thank you.”

Wensforth nods, vanishes, and she hears voices murmur before Yussa shuffles into view. Gold-coin eyes dart everywhere then fixate on her. The knot between Yussa’s brows is a deep, deep trench.

“Marion,” he says. “Allura said I am, ah… That is… I could see you now?”

“Yes, yes.” Marion shuffles upright, stretches her arm across the blankets for him. “She’s right here. Come and look.”

Yussa passes over the threshold and brings all of dawn with him, gilded resplendent as ever. It clashes hilariously with his mussed hair, and the blank, awkward expression that appears when he stops by her bed, to stare at the bundle against her breast. Marion beams, unfurls the blanket, and shows him her baby.

Blue cheeks, blue hair. Little blue chips for fingernails. Vague bumps that will grow gradual horns. A slim, arrowed tail. She smells like Marion, like milk, like the earth in lingering blood. She smells like salt from tears and the fathomless roiling sea.

“She looks like you,” says Yussa at last.

Marion laughs; she is boneless with exhaustion and euphoria alike. Seeds of resentment, nurtured over the months ( _heartsick lonely abandoned left behind_ ) had withered and died the instant her baby was placed in her arms. Marion loves her and loves her and loves her.

“Give me your hand,” she whispers. Wary, Yussa reaches over, and she takes his wrist where his pulse taps a rapid rhythm. When offered, her baby squeezes onto his outstretched finger, shocking in her strength, and Marion wants to laugh, to cry, to sing at the expression that takes over Yussa’s face. She coos, “Hello, hello, baby. Look, see, it’s Yussa. This is Yussa.”

To him, she asks, “Do you want to hold her?”

He nods. Marion holds out her swaddled newborn, and brown hands go to cradle the little head, the tiny doughy legs. And there: he has her. Marion watches while Yussa sits, very, very slowly, onto the mattress. Staring down at the child in his arms, with the same intensity he shows the oldest, crumbling spellbooks.

She knows him. It’s a look that denotes caution: that denotes a need for the most mindful, delicate care, even if he does no more than touch.

* * *

“Give me your hand.”

Thinking he wanted to hold hers, Marion does. So it surprises her when, instead, Yussa laces their fingers together and draws her to him. The cut of his robes is overlong and billowy, all but drowning his small frame in fabric. But the effect doesn’t make Yussa look childish. It flows off his shoulders — a waterfall of gold — and makes him look grand instead.

“This is what you young people listen to nowadays, yes?” Yussa mutters. He flicks a curlicue gesture, and Marion manages not to gasp when the empty air around them animates with the sound of viols. “Just a cantrip of my own design. I thought that you might like to dance.”

Shock — then delight — bursts laughter like roses out of Marion. “Master Yussa! And here I’d thought that physical activity was rather beneath a man of your standing.”

The tease works, because Yussa shoots her this most baffled face. “I _exercise,_ ” he retorts. “I am capable of _flight,_ and even this body requires maintenance. I do not spend _all_ my days inside my chambers.”

“You could have fooled me, my darling dragon. If I didn’t spot you wandering every so often around the castle… Why, I’d have called you worse than a lover. Only meeting with me at dusk!”

Yussa shakes his head and mutters something along the lines of, _You are an impossible woman._ But the music doesn’t stop, and Marion recognizes this waltz, and she hums along while they swap turns leading one another around the ballroom. There is sunlight in the windows. There is autumn in the air. Ethereal green butterflies phase in and out to perch upon her horns, summoned by a headdress of filigree chain and peridots. More magic, more gifts from Yussa — who watches her now, as if to memorize the view by heart.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

His hand startles, entwined with hers. She leads him through another reverse turn and adds, softer, “Right now. Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“That we should do this more often. Because I am indeed out of practice, and if my toes are any indication so are you, Madame Lavorre.”

She bares happy fangs at him. He flashes his canines right back. But within the next spin, Yussa’s expression shutters again. Thus, it’s with some hesitance that he draws their clasped hands towards himself. Rotates her wrist. Lifts her palm. His nose skims her fingertips; his angled cheekbone presses gentle to her heartline. Hot breath blooms a flower over her skin and Marion almost stumbles, smothering a wonderstruck shudder.

(By this point, they’d already kissed that once.)

“Yussa.”

“I am sorry.”

He sighs. Pulls away, cracks open his eyes. His pupils are thin and slitted as needles. Their waltz slows, slows, slows to a sway.

He murmurs, “I find your presence…a reassurance. Your company, uniquely comforting. But. I also do not want to mislead you. To— How do they say it? String you along.”

Marion huffs faint laughter. She takes back her hand to lift it, stroke a thumb over his crow’s-feet wrinkles. Yussa shuts his eyes again with a faint little noise, and she smiles.

“I am perfectly capable of navigating my own longings, Yussa. It _is_ part of my job,” she adds with a wry note. A beat then, and her mouth gentles. “You don’t have to be sorry about not wanting me the way I’d like you to.”

Yussa doesn’t reply. They keep dancing, the steps lulling in their familiarity. _One two three, one two three:_ repeated like the patterns tiled into the marble floor.

It is a long wait before Marion hears him say, very low, “I have not so much broken hearts as I have devoured them. It is in the nature of what I am. And you grow weary, when you get to be this old and knowing and aware. You tire of being good. You tire of being kind. You tire, too, of falling in love.”

“Yet you’ve been nothing but fair to me. That must mean something, doesn’t it?”

His mouth twists, the glint of his teeth sharp and inhuman. Marion spins him before he can disagree. Unlike her sweeping grace, Yussa moves with the sinuous ease of a serpent. He could dance alone, a steady whirlpool of gold and snow and man; and how content she’d be to watch him, forever.

“Do you love me, Yussa?”

At that, Yussa’s snarl crumbles into sorrow. He lifts his face, and his irises gleam: worn, lustrous gold.

“As much as I am capable, anymore,” he answers at last. “I believe. I don’t know.”

His lips do a funny, self-derisive little dance of their own.

He adds, “So. There. Your greatest treasure yet… And your most fragile, as well. Take care of it, won’t you?”

“Oh, Yussa.” And now she lets a sultry mischief creep into her tone: “You know I’m _excellent_ at handling delicates.”

What follows is several delicious seconds where he just stares at her in disbelief.

Then he snorts. Then he snickers.

And the lady in the tower dares to fall a little more in love with her dragon, as he throws back his head and _laughs._

* * *

Marion names her daughter Genevieve.

Genevieve names their dragon _Yuuh._

“It is Yussa,” she catches him telling her daughter one day, irritably. “ _Yu-ssa._ You must eventually learn to _enunciate,_ you tiny blue devil.”

“ _Bwah,_ ” replies Genevieve. Bemused, Marion steps over to the open window to see that Yussa’s taken her infant out to the sunny hedges, where the tiefling eyes him in all her babyish bewilderment. This early in the spring, the roses are near-ready to bloom, buds close to bursting with color. Yussa strikes a shimmery figure between the bushes, Genevieve a night-blue comma against his chest.

Marion also looks just in time to see Genevieve, with one perfect fist, bop their dragon right in the eye.

She claps a hand over her mouth. Yussa jerks his head and then pins her daughter with a look of outraged betrayal.

“Barely a year old,” he exclaims, “and already you’re a menace! I shudder to think of the trouble you’ll cause once you find those little legs useful. Hmph. I ought to turn you into something decidedly far more harmless before then. Like a duckling — or a very small otter.”

“ _Yuaaah,_ ” Genevieve says, wiggling her legs in protest. “ _Buuwaa._ ”

Marion melts as she watches Yussa bounce her baby, very gentle. He grumbles the whole while.

“You are an incredibly ineffectual conversationalist. But, well. So am I. Really, if I’m to be frank, it’s a wonder your mother puts up with me at all, clever woman that she is. Very… Hm? Hmm. You can tell when I’m talking about Marion, can’t you? I’m not surprised, she dotes on you so. Loves you so. Hm. Well? Say ‘mama.’ Go on, practice makes perfect. ‘Mama.’”

Genevieve squeals. She pokes her foot into his stomach. She squirms, coos, and chimes out, “ _Dadah!_ ”

The effect is not unlike ice water poured onto Marion.

Yussa, likewise, has gone very, very still. Genevieve babbles and grabs fistfuls of his sleeves. Then, when she tries to put them in her mouth, Yussa catches her hands and maneuvers them open to free the fabric.

“I’m not your father, Genevieve,” he says, very low. Not harshly. Then: “But don’t think I don’t realize this is precisely the opposite of what I asked for. Now. Repeat after me. ‘Mama.’”

“ _Bu-daah,_ ” she responds. “ _Yuuh, dah._ ”

“You are an impossible child from an impossible woman,” Yussa harrumphs. Then he sighs. It’s not an angry sound. “Come on, then. Maybe you’ll be more willing to listen if I show you the fountain.”

* * *

Later, Marion says, “I appreciate how you look after my child, sweet Master Yussa.”

As the years come and go, so too do visitors from the castle, as well as from her own bedchambers. She always bathes afterwards, feeling liquid and satisfied. Yussa arrives on one occasion while she is redressing. _Do you require assistance?_ he’d asked. But instead of calling Nadine or Wensforth or someone, he set down the teapot and relaced her corset himself. Acted so matter-of-fact about it, too.

Now, his hands pause. Marion turns, carefully, so as not to knock her horns into him, and smiles.

Three times they kiss.

This second time, Marion pecks him on the lips.

Then she whispers, “But if you _ever_ turn her into anything besides her own darling self, I _will_ slip balding tonics into all your potions. I can promise you that.”

He stares at her. Then, almost dramatically slow, Yussa flushes dark enough to rival her own flesh. Genevieve is asleep in her crib, and so Marion laughs and laughs and laughs in breathless silence, fangs crisp white against the happy red of her mouth.

“I live in a house of spies,” Yussa grumps, no real heat behind it. She coos and folds her arms over his shoulders. The darkness looks at them, touches them, and smells like perfume and fragrant herbs on fire.

“You are my friend,” she says with sudden earnesty, “and the second love of my life. My little girl will look up to you all the same, whether you’re her father or not.”

He grunts and turns his face aside. But she cups his cheeks, and he peers at her from under white lashes, and _ah_ — how tender are those gold-coin eyes.

“I know,” is all he says, and Marion leans down. Yussa kisses her.

* * *

The little sapphire grows, learns, explores.

Gets into ever-greater trouble.

(Comes to enunciate Yussa’s name right, too.)

She tells everyone to call her “ _Jester — I’m Jester!_ ” and _oh!_ Jester is a star, a jewel. A treasure among treasures.

Marion measures the years in notches up the door jamb, and in gifts from a dragon.

_A yellow-silk bassinet. Linen smocks and baby booties. A platinum-threaded swaddling quilt. A music box saved from a shipwreck._

While Jester is an infant still, Marion asks Yussa to set up the andalusite tower for her. He does so, decorating it with folding screens, velvet curtains, and an incense burner carved to evoke naked bodies entwining. Thus, the last of the four towers becomes the place she takes her suitors to bed. On the other hand, the moonstone tower seems all the stranger for its newfound peace. Here, Marion feeds her baby, sings to her, changes her, and gazes long at how Yussa cradles her on those shared-tea evenings. Once, he vanishes down to the beach and returns with mobiles made from frosted sea-glass, which hang and spin over Jester’s crib, sprinkling colors to make her giggle.

_Gilt storybooks. Ivory toys. An ebony rocking horse with a bronze mane and tail._

Jester laughs without fear. Pranks the servants good-naturedly. Her eyes are springtime violets, her hands are quick and clever. She is nimble as a squirrel, scrambling through the entire castle by age seven. She dangles from Bluud’s horns, mimics Wensforth’s mincing accent, coaxes Nadine to teach her how to bake. Yussa enters to find the kitchen an utter mess, because apparently Jester had gotten into a flour fight with _someone_ — although none of the staff can quite say who.

When he scolds her, Jester beams and swipes chocolate frosting down his nose. Afterwards, she offers him a misshapen cupcake as an apology.

“Wicked little devil-child,” Yussa reprimands, albeit softer. Jester giggles, clings to his waist, and makes him carry her, up and down, up and down the marble staircase. Marion watches them both, and feels her soul sing.

_Jeweled headbands. Brocade dresses. Porcelain brooches, wrought in the shapes of birds and beasts._

Both Yussa and Marion take up the role of tutors. He teaches Jester mathematics, history, calligraphy, even a smidgen of alchemy under Marion’s supervision. She herself teaches her little sapphire music, manners, reading, painting. Jester takes to art like a swan to water. The day she brings to her mother her very first canvas, it’s a pencil sketch of the three of them. Marion, Yussa, and Jester: shining like monarchs over the sea.

“And see, Mama?” Jester says, voice high and snowmelt-clear, short hair frizzy from the salt wind. She points at the ocean she’s drawn — at the ship there, arriving with the tide. “Papa’s on his way, too.”

(She knows; of course she does. Marion tells her about Babenon once she is old enough to understand.)

Marion suddenly can’t see for her tears. “Oh, my girl,” she whispers, and pulls Jester into a tight, tight hug.

Soon, the castle walls are overrun with child’s-murals. Jester drags Yussa over each time, and cheers when he _Prestidigitates_ them clean with an indulgent eye roll.

_Foxhair paintbrushes. Gouache. Charcoal. Watercolor pencils. Crayons and colored chalks._

On her tenth birthday, they offer Jester the room at the top of the amethyst tower. It’s perfect: full of light, with many windows to open, and books to entertain, and all the journals and walls she can vandalize to her heart’s content. Yussa brings in bangles, bracelets, necklaces, wind chimes, samite rugs, ornamental candelabra, a crystal tiara, until Marion swats him and makes him bring half of these back down. Marion adds pillows, stuffed toys, bags of rose-petal potpourri, and the stone-shell Yussa gave her, long ago. At her behest, Yussa also installs two platinum mirrors of teleportation: one on the tower’s topmost landing, and one at its base. He then tells Jester she can use any word of command she’d like to quickly travel up to her bedroom.

She thinks for only a moment. Then she shouts, “ _DICKS!_ ”

And in a flash she vanishes — leaving Yussa speechless, and Marion laughing hard enough to buckle her knees.

(After that, Yussa enlists her and Bluud’s help in moving all the library’s not-suitable-for-children works onto higher shelves.)

* * *

Yes, Marion loves her daughter so very, very much.

Marion wants to give her daughter everything.

Yet.

Even so—

“Mama, let’s go have a picnic!” calls her little girl, who loves her, and doesn’t know, and can’t be blamed, nonono. And Marion can’t refuse, can’t _ever_ refuse anytime Jester pleads for a moment with her.

But when Jester pulls her towards the open castle doors, and Marion looks up, and sees the sun in her eyes and the broad sky gaping and the verdant world outside as it shudders, as it _beckons—_

“I can’t, I can’t, baby,” she gasps. Then she runs.

_Lady, Lady,_ everyone calls her.

“Madame,” Yussa whispers, and once gifts her a queen’s crown, dripping with pearls.

But even without his hoard, her wealth has amassed over the years to something formidable in its own right. In many ways, she _is_ queen. Empress, mistress, grand noble-lady. The adventurers who enter Tidepeak Castle offer tribute by way of coin, gems, powerful magical artifacts: payment for the honor and wonder of her presence alone. Knights swear their swords, rangers pledge their bows. Barbarians coil war-paint like her horns across their collarbones.

And beyond even that, she knows well how to deal with heroes now. Where to lay upon them her touch — for guidance or inspiration or motivation — whatever they need for their fairytale. Many a prodigy has she awakened by a mere glance, or a calm smile.

But Jester does not need or want a queen-empress-lady. She needs and wants a mother.

And here within these walls, they love each other. Marion gives her warm kisses, tender hugs, and knows deep down that she’d die for her sapphire child. And _in here,_ she won’t need to, because _in here_ Jester will be safe, and looked after, and Marion will know it. And Jester will have everything, everything she could ask for, and if she ever wants for anything _else_ then Marion will do whatever she can to give it to her.

And she won’t be alone. And she won’t be lonely.

Gods. _Gods._

Marion prays she is not lonely.

* * *

Evenings remain theirs. Hers and Yussa’s.

After the sun dips its last light below the ocean, after the stars come floating out: he knocks. They nod, they pour each other’s cups, they sit. There in her moonstone tower, they might read in companionable silence. Or they might talk history, philosophy, music, arcana. Or they might say nothing at all. The lady and her dragon — together for a few hours of tea and fire.

(“Lie with me,” she still asks him: because she likes him, and she wants him to know he can, and she thinks with him it’d be quite nice, besides.

“I will not,” he still responds: because he does not long for it, which is perfectly all right. But he does not tell her to stop asking. And sometimes — most often the evenings he comes but doesn’t speak — Yussa sinks to the floor and rests his head in her lap, where she glides a fingertip along his ear, and combs her fingers through his hair, and wonders at his longings, too.)

One very late night, Marion falls asleep. She awakens to a sight that afterwards will accompany her forever. Folding into her skin; pinging shards of light through the darker, sadder depths in her.

 _Yussa:_ seated in his plush armchair, with Jester cradled against his chest where she’s fallen fast asleep on his shoulder. She’s eight years old and chubby and drooling, arms looped limp around him. Face blissful, mid-dream. One coiled horn digs into his cheek, the other tied with a green ribbon. Yussa just sits holding her, staring over her head into the crackly brightness of the fireplace.

Marion gazes and gazes at them through her eyelashes. Imagines both their heartbeats, thudding slow and steady and beautiful. Yussa doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. His hands pat Jester’s back, rhythmic, thoughtless. His pupils have thinned until the black of them shrinks almost entirely into the metal iris. Until they are two whole worlds locked in unending dusk — and all of a sudden, Marion is afraid.

She whispers, “Why does my daughter make you sad, Yussa?”

Gold-coin eyes flick sideways. He stares at her a long moment. Then, slowly, the whirlpool-worlds seep away, refilled by Marion’s familiar molten sea, present, here-and-now aware. He blinks, then his face twists and turns away, back towards the fire.

“It’s just.”

He stops.

“It’s been a while.”

He falls silent after that.

(She recalls. She understands. The first time Yussa held her baby, no one had needed to tell him how to do it.)

Here beneath the shadows, his gold-coin eyes are unspeakably ancient — with a thousand years behind them, and a thousand more to go.

After a moment, Marion extends a hand. Another moment, and Yussa slips his fingers through hers and doesn’t let go.

* * *

“She can’t stay here forever, Marion.”

Something painful pulses through her. She swallows hard. “I know.”

“Neither can you.”

She laughs, hollow. “You know I can’t leave.”

“Not right now, no. But maybe someday.”

His head bobs as if nodding off before his eyes jerk to full, hungry wakefulness; Marion watches a wildfire ignite in one, and a volcano erupt in the other.

“We live in a fairytale,” he says, hushed but fervent somehow, “you and I. And none can end with the lady unrescued, the princess still trapped in the dragon’s towers. Someday, Marion. It must be so.”

Fear rises in Marion’s throat — just at the _thought_ of it, of the wide-open world, of _outside_ — but she shuts her eyes.

She thinks. Roses blooming in tangled bushes. Gulls flying silhouetted against the sky. Walking, side-by-side with Yussa, along that squiggle of beach under the cliffs. Looking for shells in the waves.

“Maybe,” she whispers, and her lips tremble. “Someday.”

He regards her for long enough that she begins to feel uneasy. Then, Yussa takes a deep breath.

“Why have you never asked me to look for him? For your thief… Babenon.”

She turns away sharply. Marion thumbs the glowing sapphire ring on her right hand, feeling its cold edges. Wishing her heart could be as hard, as strong. She opens her mouth. Closes it again. Wants to cry. But this is Yussa, and she knows he is not asking to be cruel.

“Because I’m afraid.” She shivers. “Of what you might find.”

The silence stretches.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, even lower. “Me, and the magic I house inside of myself, Madame Lavorre?”

“Of course.” _Without a doubt in my mind._

He smiles a tiny smile. His thumb runs across the back of her hand. The heat in his fingers sinks like lava into her bones, scorching without pain. Then he pulls away, and all at once night becomes brightest day.

Marion freezes. Above: a spotless spring sky. On the horizon: jutting indigo mountains. All around: a blooming field, cornflowers and bluest lavender, shushing in a breeze.

“It’s not real,” she hears Yussa say over her sprinting heartbeat. She feels him take her hand, wrap it over the arm of his chair. “You are still here, Marion. You are still in your room, safe with me, and Jester, in your castle. Your home.”

“What—” She is breathing too hard. But Yussa squeezes her hand, and the knowledge that this is not truly _outside_ (only his magic; only another gift, another unspoken avowal) soothes her a little bit. “W-What is this place?”

He smiles. This time it is broad, proud and strong, and so remarkably _young._

“Gwardan,” he says and nods towards the distance. Marion follows his eyeline and sees distant rooftops, clustered mossy under the mountain range. “My birthplace, far to the southeast of us. I am showing you how I remember it. I haven’t returned in, oh, a very long time.”

Yussa’s city is sun-gilt, mountain-grand, painted with flowers blue as water. _It suits you,_ Marion thinks. Somewhere below the wind, she hears her daughter slumbering; beneath that, the even fainter sound of the sea.

Marion has begun to shake in earnest now. So Yussa snaps his fingers, and straightaway the sun and sky and mountains vanish, returned to the candlelit safety of her room. Marion releases her breath in a gust. She looks to Yussa, who looks back carefully, gauging her expression.

“If…” Marion begins. “If I do go…”

 _Will you come with me,_ she wants to ask — but she cannot.

Jester mumbles and shifts against Yussa’s chest. He lets her roll and bury her face into the crook of his neck. His ombre eyes stay on Marion; he sighs and eases the furrow of his brow.

“For you,” he says, very soft, “I would try.”

Marion stares at him for a second before her vision blurs with tears. Oh. Oh, oh. She smiles and spills over with happiness.

“You’ll have to take me to Gwardan, then. First and foremost.”

“You are mistress of this castle, and ruler of all in it,” he says and hints at a laugh behind his unsmiling lips. “For over two hundred years, I have learned to bend this world to my will. Only ask, and it will bow to you, Marion Lavorre.”

* * *

Months become years become a decade.

Marion lives, with her daughter and her dragon, happily.

* * *

Until one day her daughter asks, “Mama, can I go outside the castle?”

And _Ah,_ Marion thinks. Her breath hitches, again and again. _Here, here it is._

How beautifully her child has grown.

* * *

Three days out from Tidepeak Castle, there exists a town.

It is not a particularly small town. Nestled between the easternmost mountains and the northwestern sea-cliffs, it was once an expanse of scorched land, then a village, then a trade port, then at last a start-point for would-be adventurers and merchants alike. Now, the clatter of constant construction — to say nothing of its proximity to a very wealthy, very business-savvy pair of dragon-and-lady — means that the Open Quay promises to transform itself into a great city someday.

It is to this town that Jester begins her journeys. Fifteen years old, with a spark in her eye and a grin across her teeth. Marion clutches Yussa’s shoulder, breathes deep, and sends her daughter on small errands first. So, Jester helps the servants oversee movement of trade into the castle. Peruses the shops of the town’s main street. Runs fetch quests for Yussa.

Makes friends, too — so many friends! Jester gains a pen pal in Calianna; then joins an amateur sleuthing club, whose only other member is a halfling woman named Veth Brenatto; then baffles a wandering wizard called Caleb Widogast, who sighs as she doodles dicks into his tomes; then hangs out for a whole day with a strong-armed sailor and his first mate, Fjord and Beau! She meets two members of a traveling circus, monochrome Yasha and multicolor Molly. She buys a cupcake for a firbolg, who gratefully gifts her “dead people tea” (which, Yussa’s surprised to discover, ends up actually quite delicious).

“Everyone’s so wonderful, Mama, Yussa!” she tells them after all this and much more, so much more. “They’re so cool and, like, a _leeee-tle_ bit weird, but the Traveler always whispers to me what he thinks about them and that makes me laugh and I love them all a lot, Momma.”

Marion and Yussa exchange fond and fondly-exasperated glances, respectively. Putting down her paintbrush, Marion kisses Jester’s forehead and strokes blue bangs out of her face.

“But of course they do, seeing it is our lovely girl they’ve befriended,” she says with a grin. All day, tension has clenched like a stone under her diaphragm, so that she glances towards her star-sapphire ring every other hour. Every time Jester waltzes through the castle doors, safe and sound, it is as if Marion is given new air again, and the star-sapphire glimmers. “So long as they know that your parents are the patron of the Open Quay and the Ruby of the Sea… Hah. I am mostly joking. If you’re happy with your friends, my love, I’m happy that you’re happy.”

“Oh, Mama.”

Jester hugs her, kisses her cheeks. Winks.

She whispers, “They actually don’t know that yet. I kinda want to bring them here someday, like, ‘Ohhh my gosh, do you guys want to have a sleepover?’ And then they’ll walk up and be like, ‘Ohmigosh Jester we didn’t know you live in a castle!’ and _then_ you and Yussa will come out and be like, ‘Hello, welcome to our abode,’ and _BAM!_ It’d be sooo awesome to see their faces!”

This time, Marion laughs and picks up her paintbrush again while Yussa scoffs, not unkindly. He crosses his legs on the high stool and remarks, “I should’ve known you’d want to pull a prank on these new friends of yours as well. More fool, I, for not thinking of it.”

“Well, _yeah,_ Yussa!”

Jester beams, and her eyes glint like the sun on the sea.

“Everyone needs a little bit of the Traveler in their life. A little bit of mischief and mayhem!”

“Wicked fey-child,” Yussa states primly.

“Big grumpy-gramps,” Jester retorts, adoration all over her face.

“Shush now, both of you,” Marion says. She dabs her brush into a lighter pink-brown and raises her hand towards the canvas again. “Yussa, if you would be so kind?”

Yussa sighs but reassumes his easy pose again. Meanwhile Jester leans over Marion’s shoulder, only to melodramatically cover her mouth and waggle her eyebrows.

“Ooooooh, Mamaaaaaaa. How come you’re painting Yussa naaaaaaaaa-keeeeeed?”

“She is doing no such thing.”

“She totally IS!” Jester pokes her head around the canvas and grins at Yussa. “How _else_ would I know that you’ve got a funny little mole on your stomach, huh?”

Yussa cocks an eyebrow. He props his chin on his elbow, narrows his eyes, and says, very matter-of-fact, “Because. If she was, then you would know that I actually have _two._ ”

Jester gasps louder, scandalized. Marion bursts out laughing, and paints onto her portrait the gentle lines of Yussa’s mouth, smiling ever-so-slightly.

* * *

It’s on an overcast winter day when Marion’s star-sapphire ring blows out black.

She is mid-page-turn in her book; she stops. Her tail stills on the sofa. Not yet comprehending, she stares at her ring, where it does not glimmer despite light from the window, left open to the snowfall.

“No.” Marion’s own heart chokes her. She seizes at her hand and gasps, “No, _no—_ ”

A dragon roars like the world crashing into the sun.

Marion rockets to her feet.

Adventurers come to the castle. So, too, do villains and evildoers. Yussa’s hoard of wealth and knowledge alike sings a siren-call, and so on very rare occasion Bluud will warn Marion to stay safe in her tower while Master Yussa deals with the trespassers. She can hear the battles from her window if she opens it. Sometimes, even sees the fire.

Her book clatters to the floor as she darts for the door. Marion slams it open just in time to see Bluud rushing up towards her. His hooves stamp up the steps in heavy _thud-thud-thud_ s.

“Marion,” says the minotaur. She hears straightaway the rough tension in his voice.

“Go, go fetch Wensforth! Use the mirrors to get to the main entryway. Hurry!”

He bows and begins down the stairs while Marion dashes to the floor-length mirror on her wall. Set within a platinum frame wrought into flowers and dancing figures, Yussa had procured it within that first month of knowing each other.

“I’ve placed eight others throughout the castle. Choose a word or phrase, and then whichever you speak it to, they will whisk you where you want to go.”

Now, she places her palm on the glass and whispers, “ _Myirz._ ”

Infernal: for _heart._

In a flash of iridescent light, warmth snaps to freezing cold. The air bursts from Marion’s lungs and she staggers to regain her footing. Her tail whips and coils around her ankles. Snowflakes blow into her face and sting her lips. The candles lining the entrance halls have extinguished, wispy smoke framing the wide-open doors.

Between them, her daughter runs.

“Mama!” Jester screams upon seeing her. “Mama, Mama, it’s Yussa!”

“What is wrong?” Marion opens her arms and catches Jester where the girl flings herself into her mother’s embrace. Her heart sprints a million miles and she scrabbles at Jester’s shoulders. _Safe safe she’s safe she’s okay she’s here._ “Oh, my dear, what has happened?”

Jester sobs and pulls away. Marion is horrified to see tears streaking down her face. The girl scrubs at her face and shakes, eyes huge and guilty. She left wearing diamond earrings; one is missing, and Marion’s gut roils when she sees Jester’s empty earlobe, bloodstains down the side of blue jaw and neck.

“I didn’t think— I-It was just a _joke,_ Mama, but he got so angry, and he chased me even though I ran home and Yussa— Yussa saw and went, and Mama they’re gonna hurt him, they, h-help, _help him please_ —”

Another roar. This one blasts the doors wider and causes mother and daughter to stumble sideways. Somewhere far away, a mountainside crumbles. Marion hears angry shouts, hears Jester crying. Feels her pulling her arm with hands slippery from melted ice. The earth quivers under her feet; oh, how loud and vicious is Yussa snarling.

The world outside is blinding white and icy blue.

 _We live in a fairytale,_ Yussa had said. _The lady cannot stay unrescued forever._

 _Yussa,_ Marion thinks now, terror pierced clean and cold through her chest as a sword. Her vision fills with snow. _Yussa, I must rescue myself now. I will rescue myself, and then rescue you. Yussa!_

Marion grabs Jester’s elbow, and rushes out into a blizzard.

That is how it feels, at least. Snow flies, ice shatters. The gardens have frosted over, rose bushes frozen under drifts of white. But now they scatter, strewn and broken, ripped up under Yussa’s claws, trampled by his attackers. Twelve in total: cloaked in furs, wielding swords and spears and weapons. Mismatched — _mercenaries,_ Marion understands at once. Hirelings under a brief common cause, whom she identifies at once to be the figure standing at one side, draped in a velvet cape. This figure flinches from the battle but shouts orders anyways. Goads and taunts and angry commands of “ _What are you waiting for?! Kill it!_ ”

Marion has seen her friend’s other form before. Has been in the almond courtyards when a great, shining beast descended. After her initial shock, she’d laughed and called up to him, _Good morning Yussa!_ He is the color of new marigolds, or ancient sunflowers: brightest gold among wintry black and brown. An auroral light pours from him like seawater off a rising kraken. His great head, whiskered, antlered, swivels on a serpentine neck and he hisses. He beats his wings and they are immense, yellow as a sunset-sea. He is slithery as a magma river, bigger than a valley of riches. A thousand teeth line all the way down into his maw, and his age and power and magic floods the cliffsides and gushes over into the foamy sea.

He prowls, huge and coiling-uncoiling a movement like the northern lights. Half the mercenaries are digging themselves out of the ice, broken-boned and split-lipped. The other half are bruised and upright, but circling wary. Blood smears and ripples across Yussa’s scales, though Marion feels no fear. How can she? He is her wizard, her tower-guard, and her love besides. He cannot lose. She smiles.

And then. And then.

(A die is cast.)

Yussa snaps jaws onto brandished weapons, hurls screaming bodies against the ground. Whips his morningstar tail, and streams tongues of white fire to melt snow into slush. Even so.

One of the mercenaries tucks — rolls — swings up again with just enough momentum — and then plunges a lance deep into Yussa’s heart.

Marion’s scream is lost in the agonized bellow of her dragon.

Blood gushes, steaming great clouds from the cold. Yussa screeches and the mercenary yelps when they get slapped away with the multi-ton force of a war charger. There are cheers, and there are shouts, and Marion cannot see or think for the sight of Yussa bleeding into the wild rose garden.

“Stop.”

A crossbow fires. The bolts embed deep into Yussa’s thigh. The dragon roars and swirls like ribbons and bats aside the archer, his blow raking immense claws through flinty earth. The flow of his blood pours fast, strong, river-rapid. Marion sees scarlet in more ways than one.

“I said STOP! ENOUGH!”

Her voice punctures the air like a plunged icicle. The mercenaries falter, look towards her, while the caped figure whips around with a look of outraged fury. Except he, too, reels back in shock once he spots her. And to her own surprise, Marion realizes she recognizes him.

“Lord…Robert Sharpe?”

“Ma— Marion?”

He gapes. He has not changed a mint since she was just a young woman, indulging his visits to the Menagerie Coast. Lord Robert Sharpe, minor noble-lord and past patron, looks as though his tongue has sprouted wings and flown straight from his mouth.

“It— It cannot actually be— So it’s true? The Ruby-Lost-to-Sea lives, and flourishes! In the old castle of her own captor!”

“What have you done?” Marion says and then draws herself up straight, for she cannot recognize her own voice for the rage brewing in it. The more she dwells upon why, the angrier she grows, the hotter in her chest. Oh. How dare he. How dare this man come here and harm her love. How dare he try to kill her daughter. How dare he, _how dare he._ “What do you think has given you the _right?_ ”

Lord Robert Sharpe flushes deep purple. He sputters, eyes darting between her and the hissing, bleeding dragon — and then they land upon Jester a ways behind her, whom Marion can see in her periphery is baring her fangs at him. The lord’s face darkens, this time in combined shock and disdain.

“It’s _her_ fault! _She_ humiliated me, before all of the Open Quay! She locked me out onto a balcony while I was— I was—!” Lord Sharpe sneers and rubs his red nose. “I was indecent! Because of her, I’ve become a laughingstock to this entire town. So I simply thought I’d teach her a lesson. How was I supposed to know she’d run to a gods-damned _dragon?!_ ”

Marion steps forward. Her skirts pool over the snow densest ebony-black. Gold bangles ring from the piercings on her tail. Behind Sharpe, the mercenaries mutter and shuffle, looking anywhere but at her. _The Ruby, the Ruby,_ she hears. _It really is the Ruby._

 _Good,_ she thinks, and the thought creeps and swells inside her like a rotten flower. _You should be ashamed. You should be afraid._

“This _gods-damned dragon_ is my guardian, and my friend. And this girl whom you tried to murder is my daughter. I am very sorry for her behavior, my lord. But I think you’ve done enough harm, such that I no longer feel obligated to compensate. Please take your people and go.”

Lord Sharpe staggers back a step, expression insulted and bewildered both in turn. He stammers and tries to shout, “I have only committed what’s expected for such a slight! You can’t expect me to just—!”

Then he shuts up: because Marion glides up to him and draws an old gift. A paladin’s ceremonial dagger. The blade winks, sharp as a sliver of the moon, where she shoves it against that little nervous bob in his throat.

“Lord Sharpe,” Marion speaks, very quietly. “You address not just the courtesan you once knew, but the Lady of Tidepeak Castle itself. If you do not get off my property this instant, then you _truly_ do not know the army of men, and women, and in-between, who will do unto you what I tell them to. You will all leave. _Now._ ”

He gulps. Backs up from her dagger. Stares angry at her, then at Jester. Then he leers.

“If I ever see this girl again in the Open Quay,” he declares in an oily, menacing tone, “I’m afraid I can’t promise her safety. Remember that!”

Before she can retaliate, the Lord Robert Sharpe turns tail and flees. His mercenaries follow close after, and together, they vanish into the silver snow.

Marion grasps the dagger so tight her knuckles shake pale red. The hilt digs grooves into her palm, cold and hard. Jester touches her arm. Marion draws a breath.

“Yussa,” she rasps. She drops the dagger and runs.

The snowmelt sloshes with blood. As the danger disappears into the day, the dragon sinks his head lower, lower, until his whiskered nose touches the ground, his nostrils thin and quivering. Then, with all the weighted lethargy of a boulder growing bigger and bigger as it falls towards you, his body tips and crashes sprawling, spilling across the dark-white ground. His body glitters, and winds endless over the frost, slick with gore. Marion sobs and sees where the lance embeds deep between his sinuous coils. The dragon groans, and blood trickles between his fangs. When she touches him, the scales on his face are as soft as a dog’s belly.

“No,” Marion whispers. “No.”

Her eyes swim — reddish and nonsensical, as if with sunspots after blinking — before the softness under her fingers makes different sense as her elf-wizard’s cheek. His skin is the color of brown sand paled by receding tides. He’s collapsed at her feet, robes drenched red. Marion can’t tear her eyes from the patterns his heart-blood soaks into the weave. Now the lance is an ugly, vicious thing, his chest speared ragged through.

Marion sinks to her knees, Jester beside her, and wraps her hands over the spilling wound in Yussa. Useless. Even she can see. With a dim noise, he stirs, and pulls apart sticky-red eyelashes.

“Ah,” he croaks. “Marion.”

“You old fool,” she says. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.”

Gold-coin eyes roll, searching, and manage to find Jester where she stares grieved and horrified. He huffs and slumps against the snow. “Wicked child,” he mutters, although Marion reads the faintest smile in the wrinkles beneath his eyes. “What did we always say about pantsing noblemen…”

Jester laughs an awful, choked sound. “T-Try— Try not to do it at all.”

“Mm…” Yussa peeks at Marion, and the almost-smile on his face fades. He whispers, “They were shooting at her. I had to do something. I am glad she’s safe, at least.”

“Stop talking like that!” Marion commands him in the severest voice she can muster. “Don’t you dare. Do you hear me? Don’t you _dare._ Just wait, just hold on. Wensforth will be here soon. All right? Don’t you leave me, don’t you dare.”

He sighs. “No.” He shuts his eyes. “I can feel my heart seizing now. I’ve lost too much blood as well.” He wraps a hand around the shaft of the lance, grimaces, and breathes quick. “Even if Wensforth arrives on time… I’m afraid none of my potions can fix damage to this extent. I am sorry,” he says but sounds so indifferent.

But Marion knows him well by now. This is the tone he gets when he is trying not to frighten her. She rakes her fingers through his hair and pushes her forehead to his. He breathes her breath and smells like the metal in blood.

“Put me down,” he mumbles. “I’d rather not be stared at as I die.”

Marion bubbles out a laugh that ends more as a moan. “If you don’t want to die in my arms, then _don’t die._ ”

His mouth quivers. On the snow, his hand moves. “My vision is fading,” he says. “Where is Jester?”

“Here.” Marion feels Jester shift, then a blue hand grabs his limp fingers. Her daughter’s voice is tiny as she says, “I’m here, Yussa.”

“Oh, good. Good.” His fingers curl in hers. “Adventures suit you. Mischief makes you who you are. It’s very…very important…that you remember that, little heroine.”

“Yeah,” she says, and begins to weep quietly. “Okay. Okay. I will.”

Yussa blinks, then peers up into Marion’s face. His eyes glaze, filling with a dusky fog. She shakes her head and says, “Please.”

“A fairytale,” he whispers under his breath. His hand on his chest twitches to cover her own. “You and I. The dragon, slain by love. The lady, who rescued herself.” He smiles. “I do love you. You are the heart of my castle. Forgive me that it’s taken this long to say it.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Marion tells him. She bends, and her hair spills around him as she kisses the relaxed spot between his brows. “I’ve always known.”

He doesn’t answer.

Marion pulls back to look at him.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

Her hands, when she pulls them from under his fingers, are doused dark red. She touches his face. She cups his face. She leaves streaks of gore across his chin and cheeks. His eyes are still open, the barest little bit, and that glimpse of dulling gold stuns her too much to even cry.

Behind her, she hears Jester whispering, begging, “Traveler, Traveler, please, _please,_ can we try, can we use this, please please _please,_ Traveler, show me how to—”

Marion is holding Yussa’s face when Jester reaches around her.

In her hands is that one diamond earring. The gem twinkles, sparkles, pretty white as the rimefrost.

And then it shatters.

* * *

And then there is light.

And then there is a flutter of a cloak: fey- and forest-green.

* * *

“This is me,” Jester says, pointing at a smiley-faced blue tiefling drawn between two tapestries. “And this is Mama.” A red lady with music notes around her head. “And this is you!” An elf with a frowny-face, clothes scribbled in yellow. Marion admires them openly (because they really are very good) and ruffles Jester’s hair. Meanwhile, Yussa squints.

“And this is?”

“Oh, that’s the Traveler,” Jester replies, cheery. She pokes her tongue out, then picks up her green chalk to add extra details to the boy on the wall. “He’s my best friend! We play hide-and-seek sometimes in the gardens, or in the corridors. He’s got this cool cloak, and is super nice, and really funny, and sometimes he uses magic powers to stop me from tripping and falling down!”

“Is that right.”

“Uh-huh!”

“Oh, my wonderful, creative darling,” Marion sings. Such a clever, imaginative girl is her little sapphire! She sweeps up her daughter to pepper her face with kisses. Jester squeals and wriggles, though Yussa does not join in. Instead, he stares at the chalk drawing of the cloaked boy intently, brow furrowed into that groove again.

Afterwards, he tells Marion, “I think your child is fey-touched.”

She stops where she’s embroidering an extra-large scarf for Bluud. “Excuse me?”

“Jester seems to have made contact with one or some of the Fair Folk.” Yussa taps his fingernails together, contemplative. “No one _harmful,_ mind you, although I can’t quite say for certain. The fey have always been a capricious people. But nonetheless, they love trickery, and they love children, and so it seems Jester is both of these rolled into one, ah…delightful package.”

Marion stands up, face pale red and frightened. She says, “Don’t _joke_ about this, Yussa. Is she safe? Is my daughter in any danger? You said you would always protect her!”

Yussa blinks, taken aback. “Ah. I apologize, madame. No, Jester is fine, and should be fine. I’ve warded this entire castle against pixies, pookas, all the like. Any creature of their ilk who tries to steal her away will find themselves unpleasantly surprised, I’m glad to inform.” A pause. Then he adds, “And really, if we know your daughter as well as I suspect we do, it’s likely _her_ who’s done the stealing. Your _little sapphire_ is so effectively charming, I am half-inclined to count it as one of her threatening aspects. Genuinely.”

Satisfaction and pride rolls through Marion at that. She sits down with a slow, irresistible smile. “That’s my girl.”

“I’m not surprised, somehow,” Yussa grumbles. “That even the most ancient of fey might find themselves incapable of resisting your daughter’s mischief-making. Truly, how doomed am I.”

Marion huffs good-naturedly and picks up her embroidery again. But she pokes her needle into the fabric for a minute or so, unable to rid herself of the nervous pit in her belly.

“You’re sure, though?” she says after that short while. “That whatever… _whoever_ this being is, they don’t mean her harm?”

“I am sure.” Yussa hesitates. “They make her laugh. A lot, in fact. I think she will be okay. But, ah, if it would serve as a comfort to you. I can perhaps give you a way to be reassured.”

“Oh?”

“Mhm. Look at your ring.”

Marion does — and gasps. On her right forefinger, the star-sapphire glows. It refracts a fine ray of light down her wrist-bone and then, as she watches, eases into a sweeter luster. Dim but unmistakable.

“Should Jester ever find herself in mortal danger,” says Yussa, “that ring will darken. However, as long as it shines this way, you will know that she’s alive and well.”

Marion lets out a soft _hah!_ of awe. She runs her fingers over the glowing sapphire, and wonders at how the tiny gemstone almost seems to hum under her fingertips.

“Nothing for yourself, though?” she asks, tone light. “What shall I have to be alerted when _you_ are in need of saving?”

Yussa cocks an eyebrow. “Well, considering our daily proximity to one another… I suppose the old-fashioned method of _screaming for help_ will do just fine.”

“My, my! Are you getting smart with me, Master Yussa?”

“Oh, very much so.”

“Ha!” She reaches over to where he’s meandered closer and snatches his sleeve. She reels him in and grins with pearly teeth. “Pity for you, I’m keeping up quite well. _So_ well, in fact, I might pull ahead of you soon.”

“Hmph. You usually do, much to my pity indeed.”

He doesn’t appear as though he minds at all.

* * *

Between one damp stroke through his hair and the next, Yussa opens his eyes.

Marion stops. “Yussa…!” She puts the warm washcloth aside, wrung into a basin, and rests both hands on his shoulders. “Hello. How are you feeling?”

“Marion…?” He blinks, slow and lethargic. “I was dreaming…”

He blinks again, and the ombre of his eyes sharpens, steel on steel.

“No. No. I died.”

“Yes,” she says, hushed. “Jester brought you back. Her with her Traveler.”

“Did she? Well.” Yussa sighs long through his nose. He murmurs, “Maybe I ought to have taken her more seriously when she told me this Traveler was a god.”

“He was a very odd character, I’ll tell you now,” Marion remarks with a quirk to her mouth. She cannot stop touching him and Yussa doesn’t seem to want her to. She runs her hand across Yussa’s forehead, and watches his eyes shutter down with a sigh. She continues, “But he did save your life, and he causes Jester to smile. So I guess I can spare him my mother’s-wrath for now.”

Yussa hums and peeks at her again. Bluud has pushed back much of the desks, making way for the four-poster bed with its madly lavish panels. Swamped within its lush covers and sheets, her wizard makes for a small tired figure, robes loose down his front, bandages visible over the length of his sternum. Marion drinks in the sensation of his eyes on her, the knowledge that he is alivealivealive, and talks both to fill the quiet and to cover the sound of her racing heart.

“Jester is leaving tomorrow.”

Her throat tightens even as she speaks it. Marion swallows, though, and powers on anyway, “In the morning. We decided it’d be…be best if Jester goes away from here, from Sharpe. I’m — frightened after everything that happened yesterday, I admit. But I don’t know whether you nor I can continue protecting her here. So maybe. Maybe. It’s time for her to make her own way.” She chuckles. “Jester wanted to say goodbye to you before she went, so in the meantime she’s sent out letters asking her friends in town if they’ll want to join her. I hope at least some say yes.”

“Mmm… A wise choice on her part…”

Silence falls, not uncomfortable. Marion continues to brush her fingertips through Yussa’s wavy bangs, and his eyelids droop under her touch, slit-pupils unblinking.

“You went outside.”

She manages a wavery smile. “Not for long. Still. I suppose fear beat out fear, for once.”

“I know what that means to you, Marion. I thank you for it.”

“You put yourself in danger for my daughter’s sake,” Marion whispers. “You kept your promise to me. I will remember that for the rest of my life, Yussa Errenis.”

Yussa reaches up. His movements are slow — so that she can pull back, if she wishes. She doesn’t. Dark knuckles caress, very tentative, down the curve of her cheek, down her neck, shoulder, arm. His hand curls around her elbow, and it is very gentle.

“Lie with me?”

Music fills Marion’s heart, and she smiles at him, teary.

She takes his hand and nips his wrist playfully. Then she pulls back the covers and slips under with him. Granted, it takes a little finagling: Yussa tries to shift over except he still can’t quite move; Marion struggles not to whack him with her horns climbing in; they pile and rearrange and even procure some more pillows so that Marion can rest upright beside him. But eventually they settle, and Marion winds her tail around his arm before she leans over to nuzzle his temple.

“Comfy?”

“Mmmmm… Dangerously so…”

“Perfect,” Marion snickers. “That means you’ll heal up better than fine.” She pokes her cold toes against Yussa’s legs just to hear him grumble. She runs her fingertips down his long nose, his closed eyes, and relishes the feathery flutter of his eyelashes on her skin.

She whispers, “Want me to kiss you silly?”

Yussa cracks open one eye at her. Smiles a lopsided smile. “Be my guest.”

She laughs, rolls over onto him, and cages his head between her elbows before pressing her mouth over his. He tastes like all the world’s adoration on a person’s lips — brandy and copper and a wild, fragrant rose on fire. She grips his face hard, Yussa rumbles in his chest, and they draw away to see his eyes smolder like new-minted coins, and her lips flushed red and rosy, only to then press together again, and again, and again, until neither draw away anymore at all.

Three times they kiss.

Many more follow, after.

* * *

Marion sleeps. Marion dreams.

In her dream, she glides along the back of a dragon. Above: twilight streaks purple-orange-yellow-blue. Below: an ocean unfurls the same colors. Around and around and around: stars and sun and wind rush past her, tender, flaming red. She is warm down to her bones, up to her spilling eyes.

Her hair streams down her back. Her hands cling to scales, layered and gold as silk damask. The dragon ripples beneath her, and her body ripples with it. Wings, wide enough to cover all the earth, beat mighty shining strokes. She can’t tell whether it’s that which shakes her — or the dragon’s heart, booming under her.

In her dream, Marion peers over the dragon’s horns and is not afraid. She looks at the water below — the sky above — and feels no fear whatsoever.

In her dream, Marion laughs with all her soul. And the dragon laughs with her.

The whole world unrolls like a painting. Red and gold they soar, together.


End file.
